“Don’t tell,” he says. “Please.”
He tenders his hand. He wishes me to hold it. I do. Tendons tense along Nicholas Saberhagen’s jaw. His pipe flows red. I let go his son’s hand. They come down the hill to say hello to Mama.
“Dylan, is it?” Dywaan, iw ii? “Handsome darling.”
Mama points to her cheek. Dylan kisses it. With Mama’s gaze averted, the boy wipes his lips.
Mama took old Seamus Finnegan to the lake.
Seamus was the father of the richest oilman in the world, according to Mama. Seamus Finnegan boasted excellent health before a series of strokes rendered him paralyzed. Balanced sidelong on his wheelchair, he peered along his nose at the quivering knots of his fingers. His sole joy: watching Canada geese congregate on the lakeshore in Port Dalhousie. One afternoon Mama turned Seamus Finnegan away from the geese.
“Someone’s getting overexcited,” she said.
Seamus Finnegan’s chair was aimed at a runoff. Snags of rebar clung with lily pads. Seamus Finnegan moaned.
“Husha, darling. Make yourself sick.”
MANIPULATIVE? This is asking a colourblind man to appreciate a rainbow. Yet if I was Mama’s favourite Monday, Teddy was her favourite by Tuesday. She said I ought to be more like Teddy, who drew lovely pictures. So I drew one: black blobs. Horrid! Why not fireworks, as Teddy did?
Mama acted out “dramas.” Mama the star, everybody else the supporting players. The kitchen was her stage.
“Teddy: be Beatrice Klugman, that nelly from Children’s Aid. Stand there like a stunned cow.” Teddy: empty-eyed behind Coke-bottle glasses with melted frames. “Yes! Jeffrey, you be the Social Services Ombudsman. Scratch yourself — he’s got psoriasis something awful — and mumble.”
“Er, em, homina homina…” I would go, imitating Ralph Kramden.
“Perfect, darling!”
“You got any matches in this house, woman?” Cappy would say. “I got to watch your twisted little productions, least let me smoke my pipe.”
“How can I have matches with eight-oh-four, a known P-Y-R-O, under my roof?”
Teddy, me, were allowed to draw on the driveway with sidewalk chalks. Once I had been allowed to set up a lemonade stand. Lemon-lime Kool-Aid mixed with hose water. My only customer, Fletcher Burger, said: “This tastes scummy as hell.” Next Teddy drank a whole jugful. On a sugar high he doused an old recliner in Mama’s garage with nail polish remover. Set it on fire.
From then on: no lemonade stands. Only sidewalk chalks.
Teddy’s drawings were all the same. Splooges of orange, red, yellow but at their hearts, shapes as creatures may look with their bodies wrecked by flame. One afternoon Frank Saberhagen returned from a vigorous run with his Nicholas. He swung round the court on his bicycle before stopping at our driveway. His pipe flowed static green. He considered my picture: a man with broomstick legs. Belly following a strip of patching tar.
“You’re missing his eyes.”
I pointed out two holes in the driveway where air bubbles in the foundation had popped. I modelled the man around those pits.
“Beefy fellow,” said Frank Saberhagen. “What’s his favourite food?”
I said my own favourite food. “Fish, chips.”
“Fish and chips?”
“Fish, chips.”
He nodded, then picked up—stole—one of my chalks to trace his son’s outline on their driveway. Afterwards he yelled at Nicholas, especially his “gorilla arms.”
That night Mama came into my room with a pizza box. Also the mallet I used to break the head off Wesley Hill’s sand-cast dog. She took Gadzooks! off the bookshelf. Shut him inside the pizza box.
“I saw you talking to that awful man today.”
On the box was HEAVY DUTY in orange script. Cheapest pizzeria in town. Pepperoni with the texture of bologna. I did not know what putting Gadzooks! in a box or malleting him to death had to do with me talking to Frank Saberhagen. Had Gadzooks! done something to make Mama wish to squish him? If she killed the squirrel I would bury him. As you did with dead things. Put them in holes.
“Don’t ever—ever—talk to that horrid man again.”
“Alright.”
Inside the box, Gadzooks! made the same noises as when he had been only a baby.
Last autumn Mama collapsed. An emergency procedure addressed a saccular aneurysm in her brain. Surgical complications. Mama’s legs no longer function. A machine now regulates her nocturnal oxygen supply.
Mama was homebound. Smashing her belongings. Urinating in her pants on purpose. I bought her a computer. Presented it with a red bow tied round.
From Your Darling.
According to her, Mama became “a regular computer nerd.” I signed her up for Cyber Seniors at the library. Mama is online “24/7.” She has many cyber-friends.
“Same as real friends,” she says, “only less polite.”
New friends keep Mama young at heart. You can reach out, she says, and touch anybody.
Cappy showed up after Mama’s miseries. But she did not want him dragging his “ragged ass” back into her life. Allegedly he called her “fat as the queen of sea cows.”
“Flat busted” though he looked, Mama did say Cappy drove a fancy automobile.
The night Gadzooks! got run over I visited Tufford Manor.
“Lonnigan?” said the black orderly. “You’re his relation?”
“No.”
“Shoot. Then you must be psychoneurotically disturbed.”
“Pop by to offer my sympathies and she calls me ragged assed,” Cappy Lonnigan told me, once the orderly located him. “Who put the potato up her tailpipe?” He went on in this vein. “She suffered a man before me. Don’t know his name — do you think he could have surrendered even that? She grinded that bum down to a nub. She sure bled all the charm and romance out of self-pity. Days lying in the dark unwashed. Nowadays there’s pills for that. She take pills?”
“Vitamins.”
“What Clara can’t admit is, she’s sick-minded. Comes over her like a thundercloud. Turns her into somebody else — no: just a worser reflection. Pills are for weaklings. That’s how she sees it. She hasn’t a hateful heart. Just not an ounce of flex to her.”
Sick-minded? Sick is vomit. What was Mama’s mind vomiting? I went to the toilet. When I returned Cappy was gone. Also the keys in my jacket pocket. I found him jamming my apartment key in the ignition.
“Let’s blow this popstand.”
“This is my minivan.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?” He pointed out the hockey tape I’d affixed to the steering wheel. “What’s this?”
“So I remember where to put my hands.”
“Well, that’s creepy. We should go tomcatting.”
“You are wearing a housecoat.”
“So? A man never feels so good as when he’s got a full tank of gas, fifty bucks in his pocket, the night ahead of him. Yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s the mystery.”
“The gas in the tank belongs to me. Do you have fifty dollars?”
“Did I say I felt good personally? A man feels good. A hypothetical. Jeez. I got to buy matches. Clive’s canvassed every store in a five-block radius. No matches for this man—toting a Polaroid of me, as if I aim to light myself afire.”
We drove to a Big Bee convenience store near the bus shelter. Inside, the overhead fans flapped like heron’s wings. I brushed past a woman with a baby. Her back was turned to me. Cappy Lonnigan entered.